I only have Sylvie with me today. I know, miracle of miracles. It's the first day she and I have spent along since she was 15 months old. We've had the odd hour or two but never a full day. I think she's enjoyed the quiet and the space and I've enjoyed the opportunity to learn a bit more about her! She's quite calm when she's not being prodded, poked and badgered all day long! I've also discovered that she's a very quick learner when not distracted by Bea and Annabelle!
We started early with a bit of reading. Oxford Owl on the IPad. She wasn't keen on doing this and decided she wanted to read a book about dinosaurs instead. All great news so far as I was concerned!
She ended up drawing the 'cheese head dinosaur' - the same dino that she made a model of yesterday.
Can you see the Dinosaur? It's actually a Gerrothorax from the Triassic period. Pre dinosaur actually. So there you go!
Sylvie drew some pictures then wrote out interesting facts about 'cheese head', (I don't know??!!!).
She was happy doing this until Ivy decided she wanted some attention and sat on Sylvie's books.
When we'd done this I decided to introduce place value. I'd prepared some props ages ago and I've given the subject a lot of thought. Ideally I would have done this when Sylvie was a lot younger, but I didn't so that's that.
I think that Sylvie's main learning style is kinaesthetic so I made the learning as tactile as possible… basically I went down the Montessori route. Montessori is great for Sylvie. I find the 'proper' Montessori supplies expensive to buy and the home made ones time consuming to make however, having three children who can ALL use them makes it feel worthwhile.
So, here's what I did, inspired by a pin on Pinterest….
Instead of waffling on about what we did I'm going to link directly to the site I used for inspiration because I think it's great. The only real difference is that I used home made props. I attached paperclips to lolly sticks for the tens and units and bundled 10 lolly sticks together for the hundreds. I gave up when it came to thousands - we just stuck with hundreds when using the lolly sticks!
As well as using lolly sticks as visual prompts I also used pegs from Bea's peg board. Each group of pegs corresponds with a particular value so the red pegs go with the red numbers which are the thousands, the blue pegs with the units which have been printed in blue, etc. etc.
I also employed our Education Cubes which I think are fab. Well worth the purchase. It took me forever to find them on line - I thought they could only be purchased from America but I did eventually track some down though I can't remember where from.
I wrote various numbers on paper and slotted them into the yellow cube. Sylvie threw the cube, tried saying the number out loud. If she couldn't read the number straight away she came over the white board, wrote it, built it using the coloured numbers, built it using peg board pegs then built it using lolly sticks…. lots of seeing and feeling to help her understand.
Anyway, HERE IS a link to the Pinterest page…. The original pinner links to a video which is great.
Sylvie now has no trouble with place value at all and she understands how to add and subtract in rows. One of the benefits of covering it now that she's a bit older I suppose. I will be doing this with Bea next week though, now that I feel confident using this method.
